Matheme
The matheme is a concept introduced in the work of the 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. They are formulae, designed as symbolic representations of his ideas and analyses.
They were intended to introduce some degree of technical rigour in philosophical and psychological writing, replacing the often hard-to-understand verbal descriptions with formulae resembling those used in the hard sciences, and as an easy way to hold, remember, and rehearse some of the core ideas of both Freud and Lacan. For example: $ <> a is the matheme for fantasy in the Freudian-Lacanian sense.
"Matheme", for Lacan, was not simply the imitation of science by philosophy, but the ideal of a perfect means for the integral transmission of knowledge. Natural language, with its constant "metonymic slide", fails here, where mathematics succeeds. Contemporary philosopher Alain Badiou identifies "matheme" with the scientific procedure.
def
In Greek, mathêma means "that which is taught." Following the same path that led Freud to the discovery of slips and jokes, Lacan forged connections between the fields of spoken discourse and logical inscription. In 1955, he introduced what could be called his first matheme, schema L.
The main Lacanian mathemes in order of their appearance are:
- Schema L (1955), which identifies four points in the signifying chain: first, the unconscious, or the discourse of the Other (A), and then the subject (S), which in turn...
- Lacanian Matheme Fonts provided by the Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis
